The present disclosure generally relates to improving the construction of container images. In current embodiments, container images are immutable once created, being structured as a series of layers built on top of each other like floors in a building. Each layer may represent a component of a base operating system, middleware, or application. In many settings, a specific product may utilize dozens of layers to operate properly in a given environment. In different versions of the same product, for example, for use with different types of database and different database drivers and different operating systems, it may be necessary to build multiple, even dozens of container images with all of the associated overhead of accounting for the permutations and peculiarities of each release.